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Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Petr Sykora played a season-low 9:05 in tonight’s 2-1 shootout win over the Chicago Blackhawks as he spent most of the game skating at left wing on the fourth line with Ryan Carter and Steve Bernier.

Sykora did get an odd shift here and there on other lines, however, and was still used by head coach Pete DeBoer on the second power play unit.

Sykora made that opportunity count by deflecting in a pass from rookie Adam Henrique with 4:18 left in the first period for the Devils’ only goal. It was his 18th goal of the season.

“You just try to keep your mind sharp and somehow keep your legs ready to go,” Sykora said. “Just wait for the chances to get on the ice and make sure you’re doing the right things when you get out here. Just keep it simple, basically. You have to keep it simple and try to stay sharp.”

Sykora has scored timely goals for the Devils all season and tonight’s was no different. He claimed his reduced role tonight didn’t make the goal any more satisfying, though.

“I love to score, so it doesn’t matter if I score in the first game or right now,” he said. “I just want to score. I think it was good timing-wise that because we had quite a bit of pressure the first few minutes in the game and there were a few times when we had a lot of pressure, but we didn’t get that first goal (in other games), so I think it was a good timing goal. But I don’t really see goals being bigger.”

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Even though he had changed up his forward lines again, DeBoer said this morning that he was more worried about the team’s defense than its offense. But after scoring only one goal tonight, he might need to worry more about the offense too. The Devils have scored only 11 goals in their last eight games, going 3-4-1 over that stretch.

In the three wins, the Devils scored only two total goals, but made the most of them.

“I don’t want to read too much into tonight’s game other than I thought in the first period when we were on our game and played the way we wanted to play, we created chances, we created offense, we had a good period,” DeBoer said. “We got on our heels the rest of the night and it wasn’t pretty.”

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When penalties to Ilya Kovalchuk and Bryce Salvador gave the Blackhawks a 5-on-3 advantage for 1:08 in the second period, because of circumstances, DeBoer ended up using two forwards – Patrik Elias and Dainius Zubrus – and one defenseman – Mark Fayne – to kill most of the two-man advantage.

DeBoer was missing three of his veteran defensemen with Anton Volchenkov out with a lower-body injury, Salvador unavailable because of his penalty (he also had to go to the locker room after losing edges on both of his skate blades) and Andy Greene in the locker room with a skate issue.

“So, you’re getting down to either sticking one of the young kids out there in that spot or going with two forwards,” DeBoer said. “We felt comfortable with Zubrus and Elias.”

With Elias, Zubrus and Fayne doing the bulk of the work, the Devils limited the Hawks without a shot on goal during the two-man advantage and the rest of the power play.

“I thought we were really good,” goaltender Martin Brodeur said. “We were really aggressive on them. We didn’t let (Marian) Hossa or (Patrick) Kane control the half wall and every time the puck was loose, we were jumping on it. I thought we did a great job on the 5-on-3. We don’t get to kill these that often. I thought we did a great job. In Ottawa (last Tuesday) we did a great job and now we did a great job at a critical time in the game also.”

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Ryan Carter served Salvador’s penalty, so Salvador could go to the locker room to have his skates repaired.

About

TOM GULITTI has covered the New Jersey Devils for The Record since 2002. Prior to that, he covered the New York Rangers for four years. Gulitti joined The Record in 1998 after six years at The North Jersey Herald News. He graduated from Binghamton University in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts in Rhetoric-Literature.